A couple of days before Hurricane Katrina, I had a dream that I lived down by the water and I came home to find that my house was slowly filling with water. I grabbed what essential items hadn’t been ruined and set out on a long journey of reminiscence with a friend of mine.

At the time, the hurricane was about to bear down on the Gulf Coast, and people weren’t yet aware of the severity the situation would hold. I imagined that I had the dream on account of all the talk of hurricanes and water, and that it wasn’t some psychic foreshadowing of things to come. It felt rather entirely personal.

Dreams with water in them I always take to symbolize the Jungian unconscious. A page on the subject describes water accordingly:

Water may symbolize emotions or psychic energy. It is therefore important to notice whether the water is free flowing or stagnant {or frozen}, clean or foul. If it represents your emotions then apply accordingly. […] It is also a symbol for the unconscious. Deep water, oceans, seas, large lakes often symbolize the collective unconscious. Smaller bodies of water may symbolize the personal unconscious.

In my dream, the water was quite clearly an influx of the unconscious or of psychic energy, as it filled up my home, overwhelmed my present, and sent me back through a process of self-reflection. Again, I took this to be an entirely personal dream pointing to the stage of my life that I’m in. But thinking about it more, it strikes me that we could quite appropriately read the actual flooding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast using this same type of symbolic reckoning.

So let’s imagine for a moment that the flooding which occurred wasn’t just a real event, but also a tremendously powerful psychological event - which there’s no denying that’s what it has become. Using a handy online dream dictionary, we can put together some common themes from dreams of floods:

An emotional overflow
Feeling overwhelmed or unable to cope
A deep release of emotions or a cathartic state
Failing to take charge of your life or circumstances over a long period of time
Feeling inundated or bombarded

It’s no coincidence that these things coincide with what people are experiencing in relation to the actual real-life flood. People are overwhelmed with an out-pouring of emotion; many find themselves unable to cope with it. Others see it as a tremendously cathartic release, almost like some kind of reset button has been hit and things can begin again. Still others are raising a very public outcry over the lack of longterm preparations and the failure of anyone in power to conclusively take charge of this situation.

Another site adds:

Dreaming of a flood means the dreamer has been repressing strong emotions, often sensual in nature.

New Orleans is a very sensual city in America’s psyche. It’s a place where people go to indulge their fantasies. In our very conservative, very up-tight fear-addled collective mind though, we’ve not been taking the opportunity to indulge ourselves. We’ve been denying the possibilities of our passions in favor of cold security and strict protection. If there’s any connection between real events and psychic events, it only makes sense that a significant compensatory event is going to occur. If we were an uptight individual rather than a country, we might have gotten drunk and slept with somebody we weren’t supposed to, or gotten into a fight. Our repressive sensibilities would be temporarily overwhelmed, and flooded by our heretofore restricted desires, thus forcing us to integrate that previously hidden content before we can move forward in our lives psychologically.

With this reading, please don’t think I’m trying to say that we “brought this on ourselves,” because psychobabble moralizing is just as useless as Fundamentalist Christian moralizing. It is interesting though that so many Christian groups have at least picked up on the symbolic compensatory nature of these events. Of course, I think they have it all backward. They are saying that New Orleans was destroyed because it was essentially a modern day Sodom. I guess what I’m saying is that it was destroyed because we didn’t let its sensual good graces flow outward to the rest of the country.

When the levee broke and New Orleans flooded, our collective consciousness was overwhelmed by a sudden influx from the deep dark realms of the unconscious. That stinking swirling cesspool we’ve been striving so hard to ignore as a country since 9/11. All of our repressed feelings flowed right back into the open. All of our pent up fears and anger with the government (the stern father figure and source of our repression) exploded into psychological fantasies that secret cabals within the government (the “shadow” government, how Jungian!) engineered the devastation. Issues of race and class which we thought we’d solved a generation ago exploded in front of our faces as people literally waded through shit-polluted waters waiting for relief efforts.

Another dream dictionary tells us what we already know from watching the news programs or first-hand experience:

If the flood was gentle and the water clear you will soon see an end to all the worries that have been plaguing you about a certain matter. But if the water was angry and muddy this denotes that you will have great trials and tribulations in life. If the water does not drown you, you will eventually win out over your adversaries. If you are swept away by the flood, then that is a warning that someone is trying to use you.

Someone has definitely been trying to use us. By repressing our natural connections to the unconscious, governments and advertising can give us little controlled spigots from which we’re allowed to drink in order to fulfill our fantasies. But now the fantasy of their control has been obliterated. Some of us were washed away. Many of us were not. We may have great trials and tribulations ahead of us, but the waters will become clear and we must make sure we figure out how to enter into a more harmonious relationship with them and integrate the things we were hiding before we’ll be able to move forward.